David Hockney, I have always thought, is running his own airline, on which one may book a flight to a better world. I first thought this when I arrived in London in the early 1960s and saw a copy of the London Magazine which had a small but sparkling reproduction of one of his most celebrated early paintings, The Flight Into Italy. Fresh out of art school, he was only just getting started in those days, but even his first works had that magic thing, lyrical authority.

A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney by Martin Gayford – review

Read more

I have a granddaughter whose drawings have lyrical authority and sometimes I watch her to see if a stream of sparks comes down from heaven and drills a hole to get into her head. When it happened to Hockney he turned blonde. I saw a photo of him in his pop glasses and I found it liberating that he had come so far to the party: much further than I had. He had a flat cap, like a safe-cracker whose jemmy was a paintbrush: and really that was what he was up to. He was cracking the safe of the world of art.

He’s still at it, except today he does it on the scale of a Bond villain, with a factory-sized facility in the mountains of California, and stuff like that. The aircraft of Air Hockney have stealth capability. One hears a lot now about how he is spending more time in England, and it probably means that he is spending more time in Tibet, or perhaps Peru. Sad sacks who think that Brexit marks the shrinkage of Britain would do better to consider that, through people like Hockney, Britain has been conquering the world for years; a new imperialism, and all done by consent.

David Hockney on what turns a picture into a masterpiece

Read more

Martin Gayford is Hockney’s partner in this magic flight of a book and he does a good job of playing the normal one. Gayford is the more knowledgeable about the history of painting but Hockney gets beyond scholarly knowledge into the realm of the streaming sparks. Not that he is short of proper learning. From the day of his first money, he started hitting galleries all over the world. He was the first passenger on Air Hockney, and by now there is nowhere he hasn’t been and no picture he hasn’t seen. That was what the Japanese billionaire was doing who tried to get cremated with his Van Gogh. He was trying to get it away from Hockney. The poor bastard of a plutocrat wanted to preserve the illusion that his Van Gogh belonged to him, but had guessed, correctly, that by the time Hockney had finished explaining it, it would belong to the world.

Apart from the sumptuous avalanche of reproductions, the book consists of paragraphs in which the two proprietors speak alternately. It’s a measure of Hockney’s vividness of perception that he can always put a cap on Gayford’s knowledge. When Hockney says that “art doesn’t progress” he is strictly wrong but effectively right, because he is still in daily touch with the original caveman defacing the first wall back in Lascaux.

Like the best poetry, Hockney’s best pictures always give you the sense that the whole business is starting again. There are connoisseurs who scorn that view but they are of the kind whose necks get tired too easily in the Sistine chapel. (It’s featured here, with the prophet Jonah leaning back into the curved vault leaning forward, a world-beating trompe l’oeil effect disguised as almost nothing.) (But try and make a mark that doesn’t trick the eye.) (Anyone who meets Hockney will soon find, disconcertingly, that he speaks the way these parentheses add up.)

I remember that he could be disconcerting to meet, because of his deaf man’s trick of speaking as if you have not understood what he has just said. We were both at dinner chez Beatrix Miller, the wonderfully hospitable editor of British Vogue who knew everyone and would prove it by inviting them to dinner all at once. Just after Bianca Jagger told me that there was no point flying at all unless someone bought you a first class ticket, I was recovering my composure when I got into an altercation with Hockney. “No, no, no,” he said. “I meant Picasso was a great painter.” Since I had just agreed with him that Picasso was a great painter, this was disconcerting.

But it was just his way, and if he thought I could not possibly be as aware as he of why Picasso was great, he was, of course, quite right. I tried to say that, and he said: “No, no, no: Picasso was a great painter.” I can remember how, at that point, I deeply regretted having given up smoking, because I could have tempted him into the back garden, knelt on his chest, and convinced him that I agreed with him. Nevertheless, looking back, I still count this as one of the great conversations of my life, akin towhen Peter Ustinov regaled me with a precis of what his mother had heard Rasputin saying to the Tsarina Alexandra.

To the potential rage of all health experts, this enchanting book is further evidence that smoking helps to keep Hockney young. But I had better say something more responsible and admit the likelihood that he stays young because he is keen. On my own small scale of teleology I can attest that one is more likely to make it through to Thursday if something interesting happens on Wednesday. Hockney, by sheer brilliance of perception, has put himself in a position where every major picture he knows about is a bottomless well of excitement.

He finds so much to say. There is less to say about photography so the last chapters of the book are less thrilling, but he generously speaks as if it were all still the same wonderful ride. He might be right: perhaps I am just getting tired. But stumbling about in the arcades of this fabulous book somehow made me a lot less so. What a time we have all lived through. Glory, glory, the things that we have seen.

•A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen is published by Thames and Hudson. To order a copy for £24.56 (RRP £29.95) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.